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Astronauts describe persistent 'observer' sensation after 6 month missions
- codevark 2mo ago[dead]
- labrador 2mo agoI spent months underwater on a US submarine and felt the same thing. Later the Navy pdoc labelled it dissociation, which is in the DSM. Common Types and Symptoms Depersonalization: Feeling detached from your own body, mind, or actions, like watching yourself in a movie. Derealization: Feeling that the outside world is fake, dreamlike, or foggy. Dissociative Amnesia: Forgetting important personal information or blocks of time that go beyond normal memory loss. Identity Confusion or Alteration: Feeling unsure of who you are or experiencing shifts in your personality. Causes and Triggers Trauma and Stress: Acts as a defense mechanism against overwhelming stress, abuse, or frightening events. Everyday Triggers: Loud noises, strong emotions, or reminders of past trauma. Mild States: Getting lost in a book, daydreaming, or "highway hypnosis" while driving.
- beedeebeedee 2mo agoI’d be curious to learn about what you were experiencing, what the astronauts experience and the third man syndrome that Everest hikers experience. I don’t know if they are similar but I’d be curious to learn more about how our perception and attachment to our bodies changes while enduring these extreme conditions. As a side note, it seems pretty naive to believe that humans would be able to handle going to Mars without serious psychosis. I have no idea, but it would not be surprising to find out it is an insurmountable obstacle to becoming an interplanetary species.
- Aboutplants 2mo agoI’ve always thought the same thing with regards to early explorers. Being on a ship, sailing into the complete unknown, for months. How would you not go insane?
- lanstin 2mo agoWow, I would sign up instantly for such a voyage to Mars. I am probably too old but knowing why you are engaged in a heroic task makes one happy to tolerate all kinds of problems. Sure they might get a bit twitchy but gonna stay basically glued.
- IncreasePosts 2mo agoHave you ever undertaken a similar heroic task to have this wisdom or are you just assuming?
- kakacik 2mo agoPeople assume they handle hardships one way, and then when SHTF and their mind starts coming off seams under severe stress and fear they often realize reality is someplace else. For many of us exposed to mortal dangers in one way or another via more or less extreme sports with little margins for errors, we realized our limits are often much further than we thought. Training and exposure hardens mind too. But it also goes the other way - without that training and experience, its all just a projection and wishful cosplay thinking that looks nice on the paper and even may give warm fuzzy feeling, but not much more. And I am old enough to know how many folks have some deep issue (usually some unresolved shit form childhood) that they sort of handle during normal days, but it comes back knocking on the door in less pleasant times. Also, for such long missions, one has to handle periods of boredom very well and be exceptionally well in tune with their inner self (for the lack of better words) - most folks reach for phone within 5 seconds of quiet time at the desk. So your enthusiasm is commendable, but thats not how to select for such mission.
- lanstin 2mo agoI would never be chosen as an astronaut, but I have certainly had long periods of time doing difficult unrewarding and unrecognized work because I believed in the ends - as a stay at home parent, as a child that was being sexually and physically abused, and at a 1990s company undergoing sustained hypergrowth. I have a lot of experience with operating with reasonableness and equanimity despite extreme fear and lots and lots of boredom. No way to know of course what a Mars trip would be like, but i do confidently know myself and my ability to specifically handle long duration of isolation, boredom, and exacting operational requirements. For sure I would volunteer. As would many.
- cosmic_cheese 2mo agoI would be extremely surprised if it's insurmountable. It may turn out that this effect is triggered by environmental factors that are entirely controllable that we simply never had any reason to control. There are so many unknowns when it comes to crewed space travel and habitation that it's difficult to say much of anything with certainty.
- nine_k 2mo agoCrewed sea travel should offer many hints. Its history is many centuries long.
- cyjackx 2mo agoSurely if we made it cushy enough people wouldn't go crazy
- vladms 2mo agoHumans as a species are rather adaptable (based on the number of climates and ways of life they adapted to on earth). Finding the type of human that would thrive in the environment is a different story. Currently astronauts are highly selected (as the investment in them is huge) and the selection attributes might not be ideal with regard to psychosis. Probably one solution would be to make it that cheap to allow a significant sample of humans to go and see which one survives.
- yellow_lead 2mo agoI was going to comment this also. Drug use can also cause dpdr
- an0malous 2mo agoThe observer effect, depersonalization and derealization sound a lot like how many mystical traditions describe awakening of Self-realization
- moralestapia 2mo agoThe awakening of self-realization sounds a lot like how many modern scholars describe the observer effect, depersonalization and derealization.
- devmor 2mo agoI think you all might be using the wrong terminology here. The Observer Effect is a part of quantum physics. I was shocked to learn there was a psychological phenomenon by the same name and went to read up on it, but there doesn't seem to be such a thing and I'm not really sure what you're referencing. Is there another name you might know this by? Disassociation is the only thing I can find that sounds similar.
- r1chard007 2mo agoOverview effect
- devmor 2mo agoThank you! I have heard of this before and did not know what it was called.
- jibal 2mo agoNo one but you capitalized it. They are referring to what TFA describes ... it uses the phrase "observer sensation" rather than "observer effect", but it is an effect.
- devmor 2mo agoI’m not sure what capitalization has to do with anything. You can answer my question without being a pedant.
- moron4hire 2mo agoBack around 2015, I did an experiment where I spent most of my working day in VR (mostly spent iterating on some interaction space designs in TiltBrush). I had many of those feelings directly after. It actually felt uncomfortable to be around people. It felt like everyone was too close and were about to clip though me at any second.
- bentcorner 2mo agoI spent about an hour in a VR entertainment space, where you donned a headset and played a game designed for a large play-space. It was incredibly fun, but afterwards driving my car home I felt like the driving experience wasn't "real", and I had to put more conscious effort into my driving than usual to remain a safe driver. It took a few hours to wear away. (This was a very distinct experience from what I have felt when binging a VR game like Half-Life: Alyx at home, where I get urges to teleport-move around my house and my hand-perception is off).
- ninjalanternshk 2mo agoFascinating. I wonder what it would look like if you intentionally tried to create a VR experience optimized for creating this disruption. Does every game or experience have the same effect? If not what causes a greater or lesser impact on your senses?
- RazorBucksICO 2mo agoI grew up in a forested area. Anything more than a couple hundred feet away feels off or unreal. Deserts and mountains are surreal, like a painting.
- jongjong 2mo agoI guess in both cases, it's the result of the mind adapting to a strange environment. Once the strange environment becomes the new normal, the old (previously normal) environment seems strange. Probably in the first few days in the submarine or space station, it feels strange but you don't pay so much attention to the feeling because you expect it; it's unfamiliar in every aspect so there is no internal dissonance. After coming back, the old environment feels different and that seems strange since you didn't expect it to feel different; it creates a dissonance between your body/senses/subconscious and your conscious mind. Your conscious mind hasn't changed but your senses and subconscious mind did. Going back to the old environment makes the change within you seem more obvious since you have a conscious frame of reference to compare it to. This is probably why the conscious mind finds itself observing the work of the subconscious mind with skepticism. There is probably some kind of loss of trust since the conscious mind observes that things don't feel the same as last time despite knowing that they haven't actually changed.
- bflesch 2mo agoI wonder if there are technical factors for this such as 24/7 exposure to LED flickering or engine vibrations. Also withdrawal from your social circle might be a factor, your body has time to wind down if you're not interacting with a certain set of people a day.
- CoolestBeans 2mo agoBeing an astronaut seems cognitively expensive. Your time is regimented down to the minute. Your space is regimented down to the inch. The things you bring up and down, including yourself, is measured to the pound. I would imagine you have to constantly be evaluating, assessing, and thinking critically about everything you do all the time. And then to suddenly not have to do that and just live in the moment has to be a massive readjustment.
- mstank 2mo agoYour comment lead me down a rabbit hole of space micromanagement. OSTPV (onboard short-term planner viewer) is the software they use to basically schedule every minute of your space flight. Basically every day someone from earth decides what you do, when you eat, when you exercise and will make changes in realtime. Great read here with a video of someone using the actual software: https://blogs.esa.int/iriss/2015/09/09/playing-with-playbook/ https://blogs.esa.int/iriss/2015/09/09/playing-with-playbook...
- lanstin 2mo agoSkylab third (longest) mission the astronauts went on strike at one point. Just started ding solar research till NASA put in some flexibility.
- red-iron-pine 2mo agobalsy strike given every facet of your existence is controlled remotely
- albumen 2mo agoCool. Just to note, the video demos Playbook, the proposed replacement for OSTPV. Here’s OSTPV: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=s2gUOV3KK2k https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=s2gUOV3KK2k
- firasd 2mo agoThere's a popular clip from Joe Rogan out there where he says "Be the hero of your own movie. If your life was a movie and it started now. ... What would the hero of your life’s movie do right now? Do that. Do those things." So it's interesting that this cognitive state is helpful for some people to visit in a transient or metaphorical way but becomes weird when it's persistent. But it does seem potentially related in that maybe it originates from a kind of conscientiousness in the astronaut profession
- homeonthemtn 2mo agoThe mind works with benchmarks on a constant basis. Everything is a comparison - to your prior experiences, other people's experiences, your identity, etc etc etc Introducing a new benchmark creates a new perspective to measure old perspectives against. In essence, de-sycing your perceptions of self, reality, etc until the new and old normalize out. (You see this with psychedelics a lot which is why it can be such a valuable therapy for depression and PTSD) It is no wonder that being put in a giant space bullet, shot into the darkness of space, with the light of your world reflected back at you like the ultimate out of body experience leads to an "observer" sensation.
- NopIdoN 2mo agoI thought this was going to be about feeling watched, reminding me of philip k dick but it's more like being john malkovich which might be scarier
- GolfPopper 2mo agoThat would be closer to the third man effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_man_factor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_man_factor
- smitty1e 2mo agoThis article recalls the Steven Wright joke: “I woke up one morning, and all of my stuff had been stolen and replaced by exact duplicates. I couldn't believe it. I called my roommate in and said, 'Come here, look at this stuff, it's all an exact replica. What do you think?' He said, 'Do I know you?'”
- kingkawn 2mo agoAI Slop writing
- relevant_stats 2mo agoOf course it is. And as usual the comment pointing this out is being downvoted and only to be found at the end of the thread. This aggregator's community approach to important signals like that is baffling.
- LearnYouALisp 2mo agoYeah until another post got more visibility, mine was +3 then some people who don't do a close inspection or think others know as little as they do about quality non-fiction and writing habits and are thus speaking flippantly and acting in bad faith (see the anonymous posts site from the other day for an age/person sample of this populace): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49069791 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49069791 And it's not remotely asked merely on a first glance or just some bullets. It's more like, i know what i am saying and can delineate many structural and 'habitual' giveaways that ppl don't even talk about.
- hn937758 2mo agoI feel some of that when I return from international trips. Like an outsider looking in. Not to the same degree as what the article describes though. Being in a different culture, hearing and speaking a different language, different foods, sights, and smells. Then a day of travel later on the return and everything familiar feels oddly new and the same. While dealing with sleep deprevation on top of that because I can't easily sleep more than an hour at a time on airplanes.
- vjvjvjvjghv 2mo agoI have worked remotely for years after being in the office for years and I get a similar feeling when I go back twice a year. Nothing really has changed but to me it's sort of new so the overall feeling is pretty surreal. Same feeling when I go back to the village I grew up in. I have been away for decades but at the same time nothing and a lot has changed.
- dceddia 2mo agoI wonder how much similarity there is between this and what people describe from awakening experiences.
- drivingmenuts 2mo agoI had that one time. I was kind of ill at the time and it lasted about an hour. That is some freaky shit if you don't know what is going on. My continuing thought was "Is this going to last forever?"
- Herodotus38 2mo agoI was reading the article trying to find a source cited where I could see where the depersonalization symptoms are better described but didn’t find it. Anybody have a better link to primary sources?
- DAlperin 2mo agoI can't either. In fact a lot of the literature from NASA seems to explicitly contradict the claims in the article[0][1]. Obviously not dispositive, but this article reads to me at least partially like AI confabulation. Perhaps my Google-fu is lacking here but I had Claude do a search as well for good measure and couldn't find any supporting evidence that way either. [0] https://humanresearchroadmap.nasa.gov/Evidence/reports/BMed.pdf https://humanresearchroadmap.nasa.gov/Evidence/reports/BMed.... [1] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-30583-2_9 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-30583-2_...
- Herodotus38 2mo agoThanks for also confirming my suspicions. I did find a Frontiers paper but it also seemed very vague about what they were proposing https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1769177/full https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....
- gavinmckenzie 2mo agoAs a high-functioning autistic person, the description of being “a half-step outside the frame” perfectly captures the way I live. I am, and have always been, aware that I am experiencing the world and my own sense of self slightly removed from how people typically experience the world. It is very much like playing a first-person game with the POV set so the view is through the character’s eyes, but you remain aware that you are controlling an avatar in the game nonetheless. Edit: interesting how they describe the degraded sense of proprioception as part of the cause, given it is often a problem for autistics.
- kannanvijayan 2mo agoI had a similar reaction to this article. "Why are they talking about these returned astronauts feeling like I feel all the time?" I recently got diagnosed with ADHD after talking with a doctor on my wife's insistence after she looked up symptoms and spent days arguing with me that I was a walking example of them, and I suspect I have mild autistic traits as well (not diagnosed and not gonna self-diagnose without more confidence). I'll raise your video game analogy with my pinball analogy: you press some buttons and some flappers move, and off your life goes careening around some path until you once again get an opportunity to press some buttons. The ball almost never goes where you want or expect it, but it's sure interesting and shiny to watch.
- 72deluxe 2mo agoI am in the middle of trying to be diagnosed in my 40s, and am glad to have come across your comment because this summarises a life-long feeling. The complete inability to relate to what most people enjoy (communal activities where the joy is deduced from being in a mob) and inability to be understood 95% of the time (they hear things other than what I say, since they hear "intent") is extremely wearying. Masking means I perpetually pretend to be like everyone else and I feel like a passenger in my own life most of the time. In very traumatic or severely stressful stages of life, the depersonalisation was very bad and I wouldn't really see "me" in a mirror or recognise my hand as being my own. Avoiding people (and only being involved in quiet natural environments - I write this at home in the garden surrounded by plants) seems to have helped a lot but does anything else help? I have been doing things I enjoy more, even if they are mostly solitary. (My wife is very accommodating). I find I don't emotionally engage with most experiences, so most of my memories are "seen" in the third person (I see myself doing the activities) and I am struggling to overcome this sensation. I film and photograph a lot so that I can "relive" the events, but if anyone has any alternative tips I'd appreciate them.
- axiologist 2mo agoThis somewhat reminds me of the cognitive layers as understood by Nisargadatta Maharaj. »The body appears in your mind, your mind is the content of your consciousness; you are the motionless witness of the river of consciousness which changes eternally without changing you in any way. Your own changelessness is so obvious that you do not notice it.« —Nisargadatta Maharaj We are usually submerged and self-identify with what is known experience and therefore rarely ever question it. When the lived context of the cognitive environment we take for granted profoundly changes in unexpected and not yet experienced ways the absence of being submerged into the known emerges. And then the so called witness state of perception is suddenly obvious. I have felt this many times after extended travels and stays in other cultural spheres where other languages (which I manage fine) are spoken.
- mastazi 2mo agoI used to spend weeks outdoors in the wilderness without ever entering a building (I would sleep in a small tent) and I used to have a similar range of sensations when coming back home and/or going into an enclosed building for the first time. This used to last maybe for a couple days. Two more things that I used to experience, which are not among the phenomena described in the article, is that I was hyper aware of how sound echoed through a room, and I used to be hyper aware of how hard the floor was (carpeted floors are not common where I grew up, most rooms have tiled floors) I guess these two are something specific to the outdoor->indoor change and so they don't apply to astronauts.
- TimedToasts 2mo agoMy wife informed me that I always comment on the hardness of the floor, regardless of where we are. (I will take off my footwear to stand on novel surfaces with my bare feet. Situationally, ofc.) Anyways, there's dozens of us!
- sandspar 2mo agoIs there much variation in floors? I assume most people think floors are either hard or soft - maybe we're missing a whole facet of experience!
- xboxnolifes 2mo agoMarble, tile, hardwood, softwood(?), vinyl, stone, smooth concrete, textured concrete, short carpet, long carpet, grass, turf, sand, asphalt, gravel, hay, moss, plastic, foam, rubber. Plus the combination of different subfloors. Lots of unique floor feels.
- TimedToasts 2mo agoLike the other commenter said, you've got your various hard/soft combinations (there's definitely hard/soft carpeting, for instance). Synthetics and rubber are all over the place. Outdoors: a wet field is definitely different than a soft field and a frozen field is different from a hard pack. You've also got your various snow amounts. "Mushy" is almost universally bad, from wetlands to wood to computer lab removable flooring. Good things I have found to stand on are large natural rocks, fine-grained beaches, and deeply carpeted bedrooms.
- solfox 2mo agoI get this sometimes when I wake up at night and once or twice when looking in the mirror. A persistent notion that "wow, this is really weird to be in a body, what a weird experience!" It used to be a little scary, but as I've gotten older I've come to like it. I think it's funny that we call this state "dissociation", when, frankly, not one of us knows what the heck any of "this" is anyway. Is it "real"? What if the dissociative state is actually more like a temporary loss of the illusion of life?
- laichzeit0 2mo agoTo “be” in a body. What is “in” your body? You could also say “wow it’s really weird to be a body”. The whole self thing seems to be the illusory part. Something like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_contour https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_contour. You see that white triangle, you experience it, but looking deeper you realise it’s not really there at all. That seems to be what we call “self”, as if it’s a real thing, but it’s not. These experiences are kinda like looking at that triangle, for a brief moment, you “get” it.
- t-writescode 2mo agoYour perspective locks in on a worldview where spirit / soul and body are intertwined and impossible to separate. There are positions that treat spirit and body as separate things, and I suspect the person you're speaking to has that perspective.
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- krupan 2mo ago[dead]
- DAlperin 2mo agoMoving this out of a subthread, but I can't find any sources corroborating the the phenomenon described in this article. In fact a lot of the literature from NASA seems to explicitly contradict the claims in the article[0][1]. Obviously not dispositive, but this article reads to me at least partially like AI confabulation. Perhaps my Google-fu is lacking here but I had Claude do a search as well for good measure and couldn't find any supporting evidence that way either. Without the author offering more primary sources I would advise against placing too much if any stock in this piece. [0] https://humanresearchroadmap.nasa.gov/Evidence/reports/BMed https://humanresearchroadmap.nasa.gov/Evidence/reports/BMed.... [1] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-30583-2_ https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-30583-2_...
- rfarley04 2mo agoSeemingly unrelated, I just saw some post on /new that was saying Dunning-Kruger had been debunked by some recent study. It looked pretty sus so I kagi'ed it and lo and behold guess what came up: https://spacedaily.com/j-v-the-dunning-kruger-effect-mapped-by-two-cornell-psychologists-in-1999-found-that-the-least-skilled-people-often-vastly-overrate-their-ability-while-top-performers-tend-to-judge-themselves-more/ https://spacedaily.com/j-v-the-dunning-kruger-effect-mapped-...
- eru 2mo agoThe 'Dunning-Kruger effect' of internet folklore is not what was in the original paper. And the original paper hasn't held up to well either: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect#Statistical_and_better-than-average_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect#... (and Wikipedia is very mild and nice to the authors). See eg https://replicationindex.com/2020/09/13/the-dunning-kruger-effect-explained/ https://replicationindex.com/2020/09/13/the-dunning-kruger-e...
- rfarley04 2mo agoNot disagreeing on that front. But the article I saw on /new and the spacedaily one, regardless of their accuracy, certainly looked like wholly AI generated writing to me
- maclombardi 2mo ago[dead]
- iJohnDoe 2mo agoTime dilation. The ISS travels at 17,400 MPH. Just like satellites, their clocks have to be adjusted. > Gravitational time dilation is the time passed for a far away observer. That is, the satellites' clocks gain 45850 nanoseconds a day due to gravitational time dilation. https://www.gpsworld.com/inside-the-box-gps-and-relativity/ https://www.gpsworld.com/inside-the-box-gps-and-relativity/
- SoftTalker 2mo agoSo the astronauts are perceiving that everything is a few minutes older than it "should be" when they return?
- taneq 2mo agoSounds a little like the ‘depersonalisation syndrome’ sometimes described by some heavy VR users, where their own bodies start to feel unreal.
- sibeliuss 2mo agoAbsolutely terrible AI writing. Do not read.
- genxy 2mo agoI came here to find this comment, I had this rising nausea, I thought it pass but it got stronger the deeper I got into the "article."
- 72deluxe 2mo agoI would like to thank you for verbalising the feeling I get when online these days - "rising nausea". I sincerely thank you for putting an expression to my experience.
- nprateem 2mo agoThey've removed the load bearing crap but the disjointed sentences give away the AI and make it hard to read.
- avhception 2mo agoI wanted to read it, the topic is super fascinating. But it's almost time for work, and I will have to sift through a lot of Claude's jabbering for the better part of the day. I just couldn't stand it, I found myself starting to skip ahead more and more, not actually reading. Sad.
- arwhatever 2mo ago“You think you’re better than me?”
- pseudocoup 2mo agoEqually fascinating observation: “But many also say something small stays behind — a slight awareness of being a person in a body on a planet, a residue of the view from the cupola that never fully fades.” Can’t wait for the companion piece.
- Razengan 2mo agoI've found positive forms of this or similar sensations/realizations after heavy/frequent travel too: You know how, right now, you could think of a familiar street or neighborhood in your town/city, and you'd know exactly how it must be like at this minute? Like, "I should go to the cafe", or the mall, or the square, or Bob's house and you already know what the vibe is there at any given time After traveling to several different countries back-to-back and living for about a month in each, I have this weird thing now, that I could be sitting in Singapore, and feel like I could step outside my hotel and be in Tokyo, Japan.. I know how Shibuya or Akihabara is right now at this very moment, or Delhi, India, like those cities are right outside my door, even though I'm tens of thousands of kilometers away. The world becomes one continuous blur. And it's only recently in human history that ordinary people can get to travel so easily. What's amazing is how the richest and most powerful people among us, who have seen it all and can go anywhere anytime, seem to be so dour and mean and short-sighted.. :')
- doodlebugging 2mo agoI have to admit that I did read all of that even though it felt like something that was written by or with the assistance of an AI. A little repetitious in places, making or trying to make the same point as if it becomes true if you repeat it often enough. True or not, it would make a great premise for an astronaut or space travel movie, to see everything transpire from a detached perspective. That's all I got right now.
- techterrier 2mo agoAliens.
- Tepix 2mo agoInteresting subject, Horrible LLM stench emitting from this article!
- bad_username 2mo agoReaders describe persistent "AI slop" sensation after 3.5 years of LLMs
- anonzzzies 2mo agoI used to have this just on earth after having a stroke. I had it for years and then it suddenly disappeared.
- jedimastert 2mo agoI'm reminded of a graphic novel by Barry Jones called "The Book of Niall" about an actor going through "depersonalization-derealization disorder", a similar form of dissociation that the author himself struggled with. It's really difficult to describe but the graphic novel I think does it well. Highly recommend it